The study is carried out by analyzing some common examples from daily life in order to make a comparison of refusal strategies employed by Chinese and American speakers. Based on the speech act theories and politeness principles, this paper analyzes some factors which influence the refusal patterns. And these factors include power distance,social distance as well as ranking of imposition.

In this way, the paper is momentous for people to teach and learn English. Through probing into different refusal patterns and potential social factors, it is very wise and practical for EFL teachers to introduce more foreign cultures to the class,which may help students avoid embarrassment in communicating to English native speakers and raise students consciousness of socialinguistic persities and communicative capacity.

2. Literature Review

Refusal studies from the intercultural view mean to investigate different realizations of refusals under several varying cultural backgrounds. Lots of studies have been done from this point of view, theoretically and practically.文献综述

2.1 A review of refusal speech act studies aboard

A major study of Beebe, Takahashi and Uliss-Weltze makes a comparison of refusals performed by both native speakers of Japanese and English, using a Discourse Completion Test(DCT) constitutive of three requests, three invitations, three offers and three suggestions. (Beebe, Takahashi and Uliss-Weltze 1990)

The finding of Beebe et al. clearly demonstrates the importance of status in the refusal strategies selected by the subjects. (Beebe et al. 1990) American speakers often apply an incident communicative form when refusing requests of higher, equal, and lower status persons. On the contrary, the Japanese are inclined to employ less indirect strategies in the case of coming into a lower –status person. Status is also a very indispensable component while refusing invitations. Similar to requests, the Japanese people tend to use direct strategies to refuse invitations from lower status. Nevertheless, Japanese subjects are more likely to become polite when refusing invitations from higher status, employing more indirect strategies than people from lower status. However, Americans would like to use similar indirect strategies to refuse invitations from different social status. Because of the belief of equality, American people usually refuse someone with a polite phrase “Thank you”.

In another study, Robinson(1991) through questionnaire surveys discovered that a sociocultural problem existed in the repliers’ refusals because Japanese women are asked to say yes, or at least not say no when they were young. Therefore, the acts of refusals were very difficult for them to do.来!自~751论-文|网www.751com.cn

Liao and Bresnahan(1996) make a contrast with the features of Chinese and English refusals in respect of the variance in different situations. This intercultural comparative study analyzed the tokens of strategies employed by Taiwan Chinese and American undergraduates. In this research, they find: First, Americans use more strategies when refusing. Second, males are more inclined to refuse than their female partners. Third, Chinese students are unwilling and dare not to refuse their parents while Americans consider family members and friends are equal to them in refusing.